Is "dissatisfactorily" the correct adverb for not satisfying?

I want to express something like this:

She had asked him why he had done it, but he had replied dissatisfactorily; he said that he didn't know.

I also thought, maybe "dissatisfyingly?"

I'd like to keep the stem "satisfy" to express this.

Solution 1:

"Unsatisfactorily" seems to be the word you're looking for.

Making it into an adverb seems . . . forced, so I would word around it:

She had asked him why he had done it, but his reply had been unsatisfactory — he said he didn't know.

Unsatisfying is another possibility.