I suspect that Word is using a different character encoding than Jira is using. By default, Jira is expected to be configured to use UTF-8 for character encodings where ever possible. It is not necessarily required to do so, but when working with international character sets, it makes the most sense to configure Jira this way to support a wider range of characters and different languages. There is a pretty good guide on how to make sure Jira is setup this way in JIRA Application internationalisation and encoding troubleshooting.
However using Word, especially on Windows, your document could be using a completely different character set for these '_____' characters. I'm not sure if this is just an underscore, or if perhaps some other unexpected character that is not converting as expected when switching between applications. It could be that this character in word converts to a '+' sign whenever this character is input into the different system using a different character encoding.
What happens if you copy the text from Word into a simple text editor that cannot show formatting, like notepad? Does this do something similar? Or does it show the same characters you see in Word?
Either way, I suspect that Word is using a different encoding like windows-1252, or some other encoding depending on what the default language is setup for that program. I would recommend checking out this Microsoft support article to make sure that your Word is using an encoding like UTF-8, Choose text encoding when you open and save files
With both Word and Jira using the same encoding, you can probably prevent these kinds of inconsistencies.
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