Scourgify

Scourgify is the wizarding world's all-purpose cleaning charm — the spell most adult witches and wizards reach for when something is dirty and they would rather it not be. The incantation derives from the English scour and the Latin -ficare suffix ("to make"), and the cast does exactly what the name suggests. Soap-suds well up out of nowhere, scrub the target, and disappear, leaving behind a clean surface and a faint smell of something between bubbles and lemon.

The charm is one of the foundational household magics. Mrs. Weasley uses it constantly at the Burrow, often to clean up after the boys without breaking conversation. The Hogwarts house-elves use it as part of their nightly maintenance of the castle. Most magical kitchens, magical bathrooms, and magical workplaces run on a steady background hum of Scourgifies that the people inside rarely consciously notice.

Snape memorably uses the charm as a punishment. Detention sentences in his Potions classroom often involve cleaning out an enormous pile of cauldrons "the muggle way" — without magic — but on more impulsive occasions Snape simply Scourgifies a student's mouth out with soap, a particularly cruel application of the charm noted in several of the Marauders' shared memories. The image of Severus Snape Scourgifying soap into James Potter's mouth in the Pensieve scene is one of the more uncomfortable beats of Order of the Phoenix.

The charm has limits. Scourgify cannot clean magical contamination — Polyjuice residue, blood from cursed wounds, ink spilled from a Quick-Quotes Quill — and most witches and wizards who try eventually figure that out the hard way. It also doesn't work on living things in any useful sense; trying to Scourgify a person produces, at best, a face full of soap bubbles. For everyday dirt, however, the charm is the workhorse it has been for centuries.