Your estate is the full inventory of what you leave behind: bank and brokerage accounts, real property, vehicles, business interests, personal belongings, unpaid wages, and the debts that reduce all of it. People tend to picture an estate as a house and a savings account, but the definition is broader than the mental image and increasingly includes assets that live only on a screen.
The word gets used in several senses, and the differences matter. Your gross estate is everything you own for tax measurement purposes. Your probate estate is the narrower slice that passes under your will through the court. Your taxable estate is another figure again, after deductions and exclusions are applied. A sentence that is true of one is often false of another.
That gap between the total and the probate portion is where most planning happens. Retirement accounts with named beneficiaries, jointly held property, and assets already sitting in a funded trust are part of your estate in the ordinary sense but never reach the probate court. A large estate can produce a very small probate file, or the reverse.
Digital holdings complicate the inventory rather than the concept. A self-custodied wallet, a domain portfolio, or a revenue-producing account is property like anything else, but it is invisible to an executor who does not know it exists. An estate nobody can enumerate is functionally smaller than the one you actually owned.