An estimator is simply a formula that is used to calculate the estimates, i.e. the parameters that describe the relationship between two or more explanatory variables. There are an infinite number of possible estimators; OLS is one choice that many people would consider a good one. We can say that the OLS estimator is “best” – i.e. that it has the lowest variance among the class of linear unbiased estimators. So it is optimal in the sense that no other linear, unbiased estimator would have a smaller sampling variance. We could define an estimator with a lower sampling variance than the OLS estimator, but it would either be non-linear or biased or both! So there is a trade-off between bias and variance in the choice of the estimator.